In the Garden:
Featured
In which i panic because all of my seeds haven’t been started yet, and muse over past catastrophes of overambitious seed-starting.
With the expectation of a rush of new gardeners’ fervor this season, I got a jump on seed-ordering, relying on some trusted suppliers and a lot of daydreaming. Yes, I ordered way too much. It’s a thing we do.
Now, the planning sessions begin.
The first flakes of snow are falling in non-committal zig-zags, and my thumb-pad is chapped from rubbing tiny mouse-tooth lettuce seeds from their fluff.
I love raspberries.
My dog did too. She’d accompany me on a picking-adventure, and learned quickly to skip her own hunt and instead watch my hand reaching for the most-ripe berries.
It’s finally warm out!
The timer starts to the first zucchini blossoms…the first chiles…and that first luminous tomato, just waiting for the kitchen…
Strawberries require *just enough* work to make the reward worth it. They’re absolute easy successes, but not by reflex. By care. And then, when you return to the kitchen with a colander full of glowing summer carbuncles, you know your work paid off.
After all; nobody would care about finding the Holy Grail if it was just sitting on the coffee table.
As Garrison Keillor said once, “February is the month that God created to show people who don’t drink what a hangover feels like.”